Sometimes you hung up the phone and felt the bruising of your heart. It hurt now and it would hurt more later. The conversation was too unsatisfying to continue and yet you couldn’t stand for it to end. Bridget wanted to throw the phone and also herself against the wall.
She had presumed her and Eric’s summer plans would unfold together in some way. She thought having a boyfriend meant you planned your future in harmony. Was it his certainty about her that made it so easy for him to leave, or was it indifference?
She went for a long run and talked herself down. It wasn’t like they were married or anything. She shouldn’t feel hurt by it. She knew it wasn’t personal. The assistant director job was a windfall—it paid well and put him close to his faraway family.
She didn’t feel hurt, exactly, but in the days after he told her, she got that fitful forward-moving energy. She didn’t feel like hanging around missing him. If she hadn’t been caught by surprise, caught in a painful presumption, she probably wouldn’t have signed up for the dig in Turkey quite so fast.
Eric couldn’t expect her to sit around waiting for him. That was not something she could do. How long could she coast on having a boyfriend when that boyfriend planned to be away from May to late September? How long could they coast as a couple? She wasn’t a theoretical kind of person.
It was after the conversation about Mexico that she really started to wonder about these things. After that it seemed like for every guy she saw on her way to class, she had the feeling that her status as a girl with a boyfriend was something demanded of her rather than something she had very eagerly given.
Tibby glanced at the time on her register. There were four minutes left in her shift and at least twelve people in line.
She scanned in a pile of six movies for a prepubescent girl wearing sparkly silver eye shadow and a too-tight-looking choker. Were the girl’s eyes bulging or was Tibby imagining it?
“You’re gonna watch all these?” Tibby asked absently. It was Friday. Late fees kicked in on Monday. The girl’s gum smelled strongly and fakely of watermelon. As the girl swallowed, Tibby thought of fishermen’s pelicans, with the rings around their necks so they couldn’t gulp down their catch.
“ ’Cause I’m having a sleepover. There’ll be, like, seven of us. I mean, if Callie can come. And if she can’t, I shouldn’t be getting that one, because everybody else hates it.”
Were we like that? Tibby wondered while the girl went on to describe each of her friends’ specific movie requirements.
Now her shift was over by two minutes. Tibby cursed herself for having begun the conversation in the first place. She always forgot that annoying fact of question-asking: People tended to answer.
She had eleven customers still to serve before she could reasonably close down her register, and she was no longer getting paid. “This one’s closing,” she called to incipient number twelve before he could invest any time in her line.
The next person up was a goateed young man with a Windbreaker over his doorman coat. When it flapped open, Tibby could see that his name was Carl. She wanted to tell him that his movie was all right, but the ending stank and the sequel was an insult to your brain, but she made herself think the comment and not say it. That would be her rule going forward. She might as well admit to herself that she liked talking more than listening.
She closed out her register, said her good-byes, and walked along Broadway before turning onto Bleecker Street and then into the entrance to her dorm. The bad thing about her job was that it paid barely over minimum wage. The good thing about her job was that it was three blocks away.
The lobby of her dorm was cool and empty but for the security guard at his desk. It was all different now that it was summer. No students jabbering, no cell-phonic symphony of ring tones. A month ago, the big bulletin board had been laden with notices twenty thick. Now it was clear right down to the cork.
During the school year, the elevator ride was socially taxing. Too much time to stare and appraise and judge. In the normally crowded space she’d felt a need to be something for each of her fellow passengers, even the ones whose names she didn’t know. Now, with it empty, she felt herself merging into the fake wood-grain wall.
Tonight the halls would be empty. The summer programs didn’t start until after July fourth. And even then there would just be new, temporary people, not her friends, and not the kind you worried about in the elevator. They’d be gone by the middle of August.
It was a strange thing about college. You felt like you were supposed to be finding your life there. Each person you saw, you thought, Will you mean something to me? Will we figure into each other’s lives? She’d made a few actual friends on her floor and in her film classes, but most people she saw she kind of knew off the bat wouldn’t mean anything. Like the swim team girls who decorated their faces with purple paint to demonstrate school spirit, or the guy with the fuzzy facial hair who wore the Warhammer T-shirt.
But then again, chimed in the voice she’d recently come to think of as Meta-Tibby (her do-right self, never hurried or snappish), who would have guessed that first day in the 7-Eleven that Brian would become important?
In the four years since she’d first met Brian, many things had changed. Though Brian insisted he’d loved her from the first time he met her, she’d thought he was a doofus for the ages. She’d been wrong. She was often wrong. Now she got a deep abdominal tingle whenever she thought of being near him. It had been nine months since they’d…what? She hated the term hooked up. Nine months since they’d swum in their underwear after hours in the public pool and kissed fiercely and pressed themselves together until their hands and toes turned pruney and their lips blue.
They hadn’t had sex yet. Not officially, in spite of Brian’s pleas. But since that night in August, she felt as though her body belonged to Brian, and his body to her. Ever since that night in the pool, the way they loved each other had changed. Before it they each took up their own space. After it they took up space together. Before that night if he touched his ankle to hers under the dinner table, she blushed and obsessed and sweated through her shirt. After that night they always had some part touching. They read together on a twin bed with every part of their bodies overlapping, still concentrating on their books. Well, concentrating a little on their books.
Tonight this place would be quiet. On some level she missed Bernie, who practiced her opera singing from nine to ten, and Deirdre, who cooked actual food in the communal floor kitchen. But it was restful being alone. She would write e-mails to her friends and shave her armpits and legs before Brian came tomorrow. Maybe she would order pad thai from the place around the corner. She would pick it up so she wouldn’t have to pay the tip for delivery. She hated to be cheap, but she couldn’t afford to lay out another five dollars.
She fit her key into the loose lock. So imprecise was the lock she suspected it would turn for virtually any key in the dorm. Maybe any key in the world. It was a tarty little lock.
She swung open the door and felt once again the familiar appreciation for her single. Who cared if it was seven by nine feet? Who cared if it fit more like a suit of clothes than an actual room? It was hers. Unlike at home, her stuff stayed the way she left it.
Her gaze went first to the light pulsing under the power button on her computer. It went second to the steady green light of her camera’s battery, fully charged. It went third to the glimmer of shine in the eyeball of a large, brown-haired nineteen-year-old boy sitting on her bed.
There was the lurch. Stomach, legs, ribs, brain. There was the pounding of the heart.
“Brian!”
“Hey,” he said mutedly. She could tell he was trying not to scare her.
She dropped her bag and went to him, instantly folding up in his eager limbs.
“I thought you were coming tomorrow.”
“I can’t last five days,” he said, his face pressed into her ear.
It was so good to feel him all around her. She loved this fe
eling. She would never get used to it. It was too good. Unfairly good. She couldn’t dislodge her worldview that things balanced out. You paid for what you got. In happiness terms, this always felt like a spending spree.
Most guys said they’d call you tomorrow and they called you the next Saturday or not at all. Most guys said they’d be there at eight and showed up at nine-fifteen. They kept you comfortless, wanting and wishing, and annoyed at yourself for every moment you spent that way. That was not Brian. Brian promised to come on Saturday and he came on Friday instead.
“Now I’m happy,” he said from her neck.
She looked down at the side of his face, at his manly forearm. He was so handsome, and yet he wore it lightly. The way he looked was not what made her love him, but was it wrong to notice?
He rolled her over onto the bed. She pried off her running shoes with her toes. He pulled up her shirt and laid his head on her bare stomach, his arms around her hips, his knees bent at the wall. If this room was small for her, it barely contained Brian when he stretched out. He couldn’t help kicking the wall now and then. Tonight she was glad not to have to feel guilt toward the guy in 11-C.
It was something like a miracle, this was. Their own room. No hiding, no fibbing, no getting away with it. No parent to whom you must account for your time. No curfew to bump up against.
Time stretched on. They would eat what they felt like for dinner—or at least, what they could afford. She remembered the night they’d had two Snickers bars apiece for dinner and ice cream for dessert. They would fall asleep together, his hand on her breast or the valley of her waist, and wake up together in the sunshine from her east-facing window. It was so good. Too good. How could she ever afford this?
“I love you,” he murmured, his hands reaching up under her shirt. He didn’t hang around for that beat, that momentary vacuum where she was meant to respond in kind. His hands were already up under her shoulders, unbending himself over her for a real kiss. He didn’t need her to say it back.
She used to have the idea—an untested belief, really—that you loved someone in a kind of mirror dance. You loved in exact response to how much they were willing to love you.
Brian wasn’t like that. He did his loving openly and without call for reciprocation. It was something that awed her, but that set him apart, as though he spoke Mandarin or could dunk a basketball.
She plunged her hand under his T-shirt, feeling his warm back, his angel bones. “I love you,” she said. He didn’t ask for the words, but she gave them.
There were so many things you took for granted. So many things you hardly noticed until they were gone. In Carmen’s case, one of those things was her identity.
She did have one once, she thought as she put the last of the props away in the darkened and empty theater.
She had once been the only child of a single mother. She had been one quarter of a famously inseparable foursome. She had been a standout math student, a fashionista, a good dancer, a control freak, a slob. A resident of apartment 4F. Now these things were gone, or—for the moment, at least—undetectable. She had come up with nothing to replace them. Except for maybe Julia. She was lucky to have Julia.
Ideally, you grew up in a house with a family and then you went to college. You left your home and family there, kind of waiting for you. You left a hole roughly the size and shape of you. You got to come home and fill it every once in a while.
Maybe this was only an illusion. Nothing stayed the same. You couldn’t expect your family to sit there in suspended animation until you came back. That required a babyish narcissism that not even Carmen could muster. (Well, maybe she could muster it a little.) But so what if it was an illusion? Illusions could be really helpful sometimes.
The important thing was that home stayed where it was and you got to move. You could always plot your location in the world by your relationship to it. I’m so far from home, you could think, when in, say, China. I’m so close to it, you could think, when you turned the last corner and saw it again.
As Carmen’s mother liked to point out, teenagers and toddlers were very much the same. They both liked to leave their mother, so long as their mother did not move.
Well, Carmen’s mother did move. She was a moving target. Home was a time and no longer a place. Carmen couldn’t return to it.
As far as Carmen was concerned, that made the leaving a lot harder. It also made the plotting of your location very tricky indeed.
For the first seven months of the school year, nothing felt familiar and nothing felt real. Except for maybe food. She felt as though she’d stepped out of the flow of time. She watched it go past, but she didn’t take part. She just waited there, wondering when her life would start again.
She had lived big before. She really had. She was ambitious, she was pretty. She was a young woman of color. Now she felt like a ghost. The pale, starchy cafeteria food made her pale and starchy. It blurred her lines.
She depended too much on her context to know herself. The faces of her friends and her mother were mirrors to her. Without them she couldn’t see herself; she was lost. She’d first realized it that strange and lonely summer in South Carolina when she’d met her stepfamily.
She and Win Sawyer, the guy she’d met last summer, had gotten together a couple of times in the fall, but she had purposely let it trail off. She didn’t know or like herself enough to be knowable or likable when she was with him. She had nothing to offer.
It turned out that she wasn’t very good at making friends. That was one of the problems that came of having three pals, ready-made, practically waiting for you to be born so they could befriend you. She hadn’t had to work that muscle you use to make friends. She doubted she even had that muscle.
Her first mistake was believing that she and her roommate, Lissa Greco, would be instant friends, and that their relationship would be a stepping-stone to social consequence. Lissa set her straight pretty quickly. She’d arrived at Williams with her two best friends from boarding school. She was petulant and undermining to Carmen. She wasn’t looking for another friend. She accused Carmen of stealing her clothes.
In the beginning Carmen was disoriented by her loneliness and wanted desperately to see Tibby, Bee, and Lena. But as time passed, she started to avoid them in subtle ways. She didn’t want to admit to them or herself that she wasn’t quite making the go of college that she’d hoped.
Once, she went to Providence and saw Bee in her glory: her soccer friends, her glorious roommate, her eating friends, her partying friends, her library friends. She saw Lena in her different kind of glory, quiet in the studio, surrounded by her beautiful sketches. The weekend she spent in New York with Tibby, it was three of them to the room, including Brian, and Tibby won a departmental prize for her first short film.
Carmen didn’t want them coming to see her here, where she had no glory at all. She didn’t want them to see her like this.
She first met Julia in the late winter in the theater department, where Carmen was signing up for a playwriting class. Julia mistook her for a theater type. “Have you worked on sets?” she’d asked Carmen.
Carmen couldn’t figure out whom she was talking to. “Me?” she’d finally asked. She wasn’t sure which was more surprising: that Julia took her for a set builder or that Julia was talking to her at all.
How low I have fallen, Carmen thought miserably. Nobody in high school would have mistaken her for a set builder. She’d been one of the cute girls, particularly by the end of high school. She showed off her belly button in tiny shirts. She flirted outrageously. She wore red lipstick to take her SATs.
Carmen tried to scrape together a little bit of dignity. “No, I’m not really a set person,” she said.
“Oh, come on. Everybody’s a set person. Jeremy Rhodes is directing a production of The Miracle Worker for senior week, and we’re getting desperate,” Julia explained.
Carmen recognized Julia from the cafeteria. She was one of the few freshmen that people knew a
bout. She was beautiful and somewhat dramatic-looking, with her pale white skin and her long black hair. She wore vintage jackets and long bohemian skirts and made a certain amount of noise with her various pins and beads and bangles. She was small and thin but used the oversized gestures of a person who knew she was being looked at.
“Well, sorry,” Carmen said.
“Let me know if you change your mind, okay?” Julia said. “It’s a really cool group of people. Really tight.”
Carmen nodded and fled, but she did think about it. She thought wistfully of having things to do and “really cool” people to do them with.
Julia approached her again in the cafeteria a few weeks later. “Hey, how’s it going?”
Carmen felt self-conscious because she was eating alone. She was torn between being unhappy that Julia was seeing her this way and being happy that all the rest of the people there were seeing her with Julia. “All right,” Carmen said.
“Did you get into the writing class?”
“Nope,” said Carmen. “How’s the play going?”
“Really good.” Julia smiled a winning smile. “Still looking for people to join up.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“Yeah. You should really think about it. Jeremy’s very cool. There are only three performances and they don’t start until after exams. Why don’t you come tonight? We have a rehearsal at seven. Just see what you think.”
“Thanks,” Carmen said, feeling almost absurdly grateful. Grateful that Julia had noticed her, remembered her, talked to her, invited her to something. Did Julia know how alone she was here? “Maybe I will,” she said.
So grateful was she, she probably would have agreed if Julia had invited her to drink poisoned Kool-Aid.
And that was how, one week later, Carmen found herself standing on a ladder wearing a tool belt. If her friends saw her, they would not recognize her. No one in her high-school graduating class would recognize her. Or at least, she hoped they wouldn’t. She didn’t recognize herself. But really, who was herself? Who?